Quotes from Ch. 8: Technology and Meaning

Heidegger claims technology turns everything it touches into mere raw materials, which he calls "standing reserves." We ourselves are now incorporated into the mechanism, mobilized as objects of technique. Modern technology is based on methodical planning which itself presupposes the "enframing" of being, its conceptual and experiential reduction to a manipulable vestige of itself. (183-4)

Instead of a world of authentic things capable of gathering a rich variety of contexts and meanings, we are left with an "objectless" heap of functions. (184)

All these forms of techne let things appear as what they most profoundly are, in some sense, prior to human willing and making. For Heidegger, the fundamental mystery of existence is this self-manifesting of things in an opening provided by man. (184)

[Heidegger] claims that once we achieve a free relation to technology, we will stand in the presence of technology's hidden meaning. Even though we cannot know that meaning, awareness of its existence already reveals the technological enframing as an opening, dependent on man, and disclosing being. If we can receive it in that spirit, it will no longer dominate us and will leave us open to welcome a still deeper meaning than anything technology can supply. (185)

We could restate his main point as the claim that technology is a cultural form through which everything in the modern world becomes available for control. Technology thus violates both humanity and nature at a far deeper level than war and environmental destruction. To this culture of control corresponds an inflation of the subjectivity of the controller, a narcissistic degeneration of humanity. (185)

Borgmann would willingly concede the usefulness of may devices, but the generalization of the device paradigm, its universal substitution for simpler ways, has a deadening effect. Where means and ends, contexts and commodities are strictly separated, life is drained of meaning. Individual involvement with nature and other human beings is reduced to a bare minimum, and possession and control become the highest values. (188)

I would prefer to consider a more narrowly philosophical implication of Heidegger's conception of the thing. This is the break with substance metaphysics it implies. The jug is not primarily a physical object which has gathering relations. It is these relations and is merely released to its existence as such by production, or known in its outward appearance by representation. (195)

The world only reveals itself as [a network] to a reflection that knows how to get behind cognition to a more primordial encounter with being. Such phenomenological reflection places us inside the flux of significance in which the world as network consists. This is not a collection of objective things, substances, but a lifeworld in which we actively participate and which only comes to light insofar as we understand participation as the most fundamental relation to reality. (196)

These promising innovations are the work of human beings intervening in the design of the technical objects with which they are involved. This is the only meaningful "encounter between global technology and modern man." This encounter is not simply another instance of the goal-orientated pursuit of efficiency, but constitutes an essential dimension of the contemporary struggle for a humane and livable world. (199)